WiX best practices for service install

[Anthony van der Hoorn]

Hey guys

I'm new to services and TopShelf, and just starting to learn the ropes. I know this isn't strictly a question specific to TopShelf but I thought it would be something that most of us would come across.

I'm needing to create an installer for my service and I'm wondering what best practices I should follow. 

• Where should I direct the WiX to install the service by default?
  
• How you should you handle permissions?
  

I'm also following this at the moment http://www.gbogea.com/2011/10/19/installing-a-topshelf-service-using-wix is this still the best reference for Wix and TopShelf?

Cheers

Anthony

[Dru Sellers]

I have no idea about WiX

The majority of my deployments that also needed to do permissions were done using 'dropkick'

https://github.com/chucknorris/dropkick

-d

[Travis Smith]

Didn't Eric Lee, previously of Microsoft, add some post-install hooks
to Topshelf? One could leverage those as well for whatever code needs
to change.

-Travis

[Henrik Feldt]

I've been looking into Puppet the last days and I would say that it solves your current and future needs of deployment.

I'm intending to write a blob post about how to get started as a .Net developer, but in the meantime, here's a quick'n'dirty:

Download Puppet Enterprise,
Download Puppet Client for Windows,
Set the DNS-name of the computer that will host puppet to 'puppet' using an A-pointer.
Start that computer up, set its hostname.
Run ./install-puppet-enterprise,
Answer: y, y, y, y.
Install the client on windows. Make it join the master.
Place a myservice.pp-file in the /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/manifests/ folder, doing 'myserivce.exe install' as the installation command of the service on the node that you've defined in site.pp.
Make the client request a new puppet run. Your service installed. :)

[Dru Sellers]

why puppet over chef?

just curio, would agree that if you can wrap your head around it, that you should be rocking.

-d

[Henrik Feldt]

I prefer having a static declarative DSL, because it enables stuff like stackhammer. Also puppet is a certificate authority, which is awesome when you want to secure eg rabbitmq w/ ssl.